Meeting of the Parliament 04 September 2025
Jamie Greene makes a fair point, which is one of the reasons why we carried out a review of the sponsorship arrangements between the Scottish Government and public bodies. In the WICS situation, the Government was found to be lacking when it came to the sponsorship arrangement and the feeding back of information from the individual in the Government who was responsible for that arrangement to Government ministers. The review showed that the process was too reliant on one individual. One of the changes that will be made is that multiple people will be involved in the sponsorship arrangement. That is a fundamental change.
Ministers were not aware of the issues until the Auditor General’s first section 22 report and the freedom of information releases in the months that followed. On publication of the first section 22 report, officials—alongside the leadership of WICS—took immediate action to drive improvements and hold WICS to account for the delivery of its action plan. As we discovered further examples of completely inappropriate expenditure, it became clear that a more forensic investigation should be undertaken. One key conclusion of our review is that compliance and cultural issues were long standing and deep rooted. As we said at the time, the tone from the top needed to be reset, and we acted quickly to do that.
In July 2024, we appointed two experienced interim board members, neither of whom had any previous connections with WICS. One of those interim members, Ronnie Hinds, became interim chair last October, and the recruitment of a permanent chair is under way. I put on record my personal gratitude to Mr Hinds and his fellow board members for their hard work in steering WICS reforms.
To the credit of the new board and leadership team, significant progress has been made in redeveloping the organisation’s structures and governance and changing its culture. Our role review has resulted in a restructured senior team. A permanent chief executive is now in post, and new directors will join WICS in the autumn. Crucially, financial policies and processes have been fully reviewed and the ambiguous and outdated rules of the past have been removed. I hope that those measures will support an improved culture of compliance.